If you’ve been following the EuroMaidan protests, you need to amp up your attention this morning. As far as I can tell this is a hasty by hand vote in Ukraine’s parliament that will have wide-reaching effects. These include criminalization of criticism of the government in social media.

1. A beautiful Aas it once wasis—like— an apple starin—Vien’na (AS N)2. A beautiful film staris a prayerAs gladly I’s once staged (in old time VIENNA)and as beautiful; as it once waS.3. A A A winter that is there.Winter, summer, autumn and rainP l e a s e God—bounty me the apple gain.A A A spring that is THERE.

Our guest and I stayed up late last night looking at our respective regions on google earth, during which time I learned an incredible amount about the ecology, economy, and governance of the Crimean Peninsula. It’s so incredible to have a chance to speak Russian again, I can’t even begin to describe it.

It is also worth noting this: if you don’t stay on top of your medical vocabulary, you run a high risk of mistaking someone’s surgery on their deviated septum for a surgical severing of their corpus callosum. This will cause a lot of confusion which, due to the close proximity of the brain and the nasal passages, cannot be cleared up through gesture.

For the translation of Russian poetry into EnglishJudged by Sasha Dugdale, Catriona Kelly and Glyn Maxwell

First Boris Dralyuk and Irina Mashinski for ‘Field Hospital’ by Arseny Tarkovsky Second Iryna Shuvalova for ‘The Prayer of the Touch’ by Sergei Chegra Third Alexandra Berlina for ‘You can’t tell a gnat’ by Joseph Brodsky

Commended

Huw Davies for ‘Camellia’ by Igor IrtenievBoris Dralyuk for ‘All that Happened to Me’ by Irina MashinskiMark Hanin for ‘I Washed before Bed in the Yard’ by Osip MandelstamKatherine Young for ‘This is life: the summer house’ by Inna Kabysh

“I watch the film unfold with a mixture of admiration, bewilderment, and, for purely selfish and private reasons, disappointment. My potentially global work has been made local. It is now locked into Germanic culture. It portrays the German media world, a distinctly German sensuality, a concrete Tyrolese. Well, haven’t I written frequently in admiration of the artist happy to engage with his local community and ignore the global? Indeed I have. But this local is not my local. And of course, thanks to the complex laws of film rights and copyright, something else I have recently expressed a few opinions about, it will now not be easy for English or American producers to make their own version of the film. Like it or not, Cleaver, Cleaver, really has expatriated. He’s Cliewer now.”

-Tim Parks

Parks has a very interesting blog post in the New York Review of Books on the German film adaptation of his novel Cleaver. It raises a number of the issues I hope our ACLA panel can address.

Park’s essay is about film adaptation, cultural adaptation, and the specificity of the local (a phrase that I believe I have stolen from Seamus Heaney’s nobel lecture). It falls squarely into the concerns I hoped to address when I proposed the panel, but it also touches on issues of accessibility that I think are too rarely discussed in literary circles. Park’s essay is not about disability, but the disabling nature of copyright. I want to push his questions to disability, regardless of whether he wants to go there.

I think we might find these same concerns raised in debates about sign language and the potential for cultural erasure in body modification (Drury University has a quick, if somewhat dated summary here). I have previously reblogged two striking posts by others about braille as part of my own ongoing reflections about what accessibility means in the worlds I inhabit as a writer, academic, and teacher, and I hope to recruit a few presenters for our panel who might consider how translation interacts with ongoing debates about accessibility. If this is your field and you’d like to participate, you can submit here anytime before Nov. 15th.